Back in June, Rockstar and TakeTwo began sending takedowns to the operators of modding tools of varying skeeviness, including OpenIV, a decade-old foundational toolset used by countless modders for the Grand Theft Auto series. The legal threats to a community staple, demands that cheater-centric mods donate their profits to charity, and dubious claim that the move was intended to protect Grand Theft Auto Online — which doesn’t allow mods to begin with — caused players to riot across the forums, Reddit, and Steam, where reviewbombing caused GTAV’s rating to plummet, in spite of Rockstar’s relatively noncommittal statement that the companies “generally will not take legal action against third-party projects involving Rockstar’s PC games that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of third parties.”

The good news is that this means OpenIV is back in development. The bad news is that one of its biggest projects is toast.

“The development of OpenIV will be continued as before. OpenIV never supported GTA Online modding and will not support it in the future. Our work will be continued within the Rockstar modding policy,” says the OpenIV team on the official forums. “Unfortunately, our highly anticipated mod ‘Liberty City in GTAV‘ will not be released because it clearly contradicts with Rockstar modding policy. Liberty City mod is a big loss for us, since it was a huge part of our motivation to push OpenIV functionality. If you are wondering what is next, well, we are currently revising our plans for the future.”

the loss of importing gta4’s map is a shame but not surprising. because there’s very little that’s legal about it. this goes as well for the morrowwind map import into skyrim which has been being worked on for some years now.

i mean aside from the fact that most of gta4’s map just isn’t very good (probably one of the worst in the franchise imo).

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1 year ago

Reader

Schmidt.Capela

The way most similar projects work make it at least into a gray area, if not effectively legal (or as legal as any modding can be). The usual way is to create a program that will extract all data from the earlier game, process it, apply a series of patches, and make it load on the new game; the projects never distribute the copyrighted data, it’s up to the user to provide it, and as the cherry on top the installers will usually balk if they detect that the older game is a cracked copy.

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1 year ago

Reader

deekay_000

it’s at best and with very liberal interpretation a grey area legally to it the best most legal way possible.